By Azra Majid

Part of the ‘Do It Together’ team’s original remit was to explore what MS Office 365 could offer identify what we could deliver ourselves, and when we’d need developers or Microsoft support. The ‘do it together’ element was to work collaboratively with users and help them develop their skills in the MS Office 365 suite of applications the council had paid for.

Recently, the Resilience Team approached us with a challenge, the team needed a solution to automate the management of the BCPs as it was falling to one person, alongside their normal workload.

The process was havily manual currently tracking all the BCPs using an excel spreadsheet and saving plans on a shared drive. Plans are received via emails and reminders are sent out via emails. The team member has to match the submitted plans to certain categories but categorisation was especially tricky, as each area called its plan something different.

From the initial conversation with the team member it appeared we could reuse a solution we had previously built for the Audit team. But in the initial conversation, team member Laura asked if we could “do it together” as she wanted to learn how to do this herself and so not be reliant on the team if she needed to make changes etc. What a wonderful response to the issue!

Laura already knew how to create MS forms. This would be used to ensure consistency in the data capture, eg., categories would be available on a drop-down list. My colleague Nathan Thomas and I showed her how to:

• Map form responses into a SharePoint list using Power Query
• Set up validation rules and triggers, e.g. reminders one week before a BCP expires
• Introduce a traffic-light system (green = in date, amber = expiring soon, red = overdue)

This next stage will be how to connect the sharepoint list into the Power BI reporting tool, so she would be able to produce visual reports that can be shared and distributed to management to monitor the state of the BCPs.

This would reduce the time and effort she has to currently expend managing the whole process.

Whilst this may seem simple to some people who are familiar with using the MS Office tools available to all staff, until you start using these tools there will always be some trepidation on what you can do and what is the art of the possible. Laura’s willingness to learn and take ownership shows exactly what’s possible when we embrace the tools we already have. DTS will always be here to support, but empowering colleagues to manage and improve their own processes is the real win.It does bring to mind the old saying

‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.’